This important international exhibition surveys Peter Doig’s paintings and works on paper of the past 10 years. The show places particular emphasis on the artist's approach to serial motifs and recurring imagery.

Peter Doig (b. Edinburgh 1959) first came to prominence in the 1990s with his paintings of winter landscapes, highly atmospheric scenes of lakes (often with a lone canoe), and houses screened by trees and ski slopes. The rich and layered surfaces of his paintings showed that Doig was as much interested in abstract, formal qualities as he was in subject matter.

Over the period covered by this exhibition Doig has split his time between a house and studio in Trinidad, a studio in London and a professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His peripatetic life, memories of a childhood partly spent in Canada and his later life and studies in London have given him a particularly rich visual knowledge. Regardless of where Doig’s motifs originate, his experiences cross-fertilize and enhance his works. As fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters: There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.

Throughout a career of three decades, Doig has reinvigorated a medium considered by many to have fallen into irrelevance. His inventive style, uncommonly sensuous palette and suggestive imagery set him apart from the conceptualism dominating much of contemporary art. Doig’s willingness to take up the challenges posed by the work of Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard, Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper places him in an ongoing dialogue with a long line of great artists.

Following its debut in Edinburgh, No Foreign Lands: Peter Doig, travels to Canada, where it will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montréal and curated by Stéphane Aquin (7 February - 20 April 2014). The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue featuring essays by Keith Hartley, Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Stéphane Aquin, Curator of Contemporary Art in Montréal; and an interview with the artist conducted by Hilton Als, a New York-based critic, author and regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine.